>>5564621>>5566317>isn't kinda stupid to play characters with 0 athletics? Nah. There isn't a single Attribute or Skill I would say is stupid to lack. Especially for a prelude. RPGs, and especially ones like CofD, are games about story generation. Coming at it from an optimisation PoV is sort of not meeting the game on its own terms. You certainly *can* play it like that, and there is nothing wrong with it so long as it's all fun at the table, but it's not what the game is trying to achieve.
Character generation is first and foremost about making a *character*, someone who is fairly believable in the fiction. For a prelude game like the girls are play these are essentially normal people. Now it's also a vtuber stream for entertainment value so "normal people" has been considerably stretched but the idea still stands. So a character like Yuul, who is a bookish student type, having no skill at Athletics is totally in line with their character. Someone more rugged, like Kiara, is a character you'd expect to have Athletics and they do. As these characters progress I'd expect Calli to give them a nudge and suggest a dot or two in it as that's going to make sense for them. But for a prelude game not having any of the traditional skills of a Hunter is totally valid, as they aren't yet Hunters. Same goes for every Skill in the game really, nobody needs everything but a dot in most things you'll maybe use isn't going to be a bad way to spend XP.
>physically enhanced creature trying to kill youThe more important part of Athletics for this is it's role in Defence. Defence = (Lower of Wits or Dexterity) + Athletics. Your Defence acts as a dice pool penalty vs any unarmed, melee, or thrown weapon attacks. So higher Defence means less likely to die, but your Defence does drop by 1 every time you get attacked so lots of people attacking the same thing will eventually get through their Defence. Defence resets at the start of a round. So now you're probably thinking "Wow, Athletics is a must for every character" but that's where Merits come in.
Specifically, Defensive Combat. It's a 1 dot Merit that lets you sub in Brawl/Weaponry for Athletics when you calculate Defence. Each dot in a Merit costs 1 XP, but each dot in a skill costs 2. So for characters with better dots in those than Athletics you've got a cheaper way of getting good Defence than having to start pumping XP into a Skill you might not otherwise really want. There are some other Merits that help this stuff too, like Unarmed Defence that builds off of Defensive Fighting (Brawl) which focuses on maintaining Defence, counter-attacks, and redirecting attacks. Lots of Martial Arts Merits do stuff too, but those require Athletics. So Defensive Combat is really where it's at and would be really solid for Watoto and Yuul, they've got two dots in Brawl and Weaponry respectively, which means they'd both get +2 Defence for half the cost of getting +1 if they went with Athletics. But they wouldn't mitigate the untrained Athletics penalty, but that brings us on to the next point.
There are a good deal of threats where none of that matters though, ephemeral entities, psychics, and the like generally don't give a shit about defence.
>getting -1 every time you try to run or perform the most minor physical activity...A GM shouldn't really be calling for rolls just to do anything and everything. Everyone knows how to run, everyone knows how to do most basic things. If there isn't any uncertainty then rolling is basically just dicking over PCs because you have a much greater risk of failing anything you roll than is reasonable for basic actions. Take climbing up a ledge that's a little over waist height, anybody that is basically healthy can do that even if they're not athletic but at 1 (average Dex (2) -1 for untraint) dice you only have a 30% chance to succeed. Which is clearly unreasonable. So rolling only when there is reasonably uncertainty or when failure will be interesting is important.
Generally it's bad practice to make "save or die" checks too, that is to say a roll you either succeed at or you die. Failing a roll can obviously result in death in all sorts of situations but typically those are either going to be the players fault in some respect or the consequence of more than one roll. Also, the something like Yuul getting fucked up there was little that could really be done. The Hook is basically a god, it's so far above what is typically expected to be dealt with in a prelude that it was sort of ridiculous. Calli was running that think basically as a plot device rather than an enemy, Yuul was never in any real danger of dying but had it been actually out to kill them there is little to be done about it.
>what am I missing?All the above, but also that dying isn't really a bad thing. Like, it'll suck to lose a character you're invested in, but then you get to make a whole new character and the death of your last ones adds stakes and tension to the story.
